After learning DaVinci Resolve, I decided to delve into Adobe SpeedGrade, so far I will be sticking with Resolve

After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.

First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.

With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it’s only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.

You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.

And there there is the fact that it doesn’t export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!

And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.

I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.

I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don’t make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.

Oliver Peters at Digitalfilms has a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color and my thoughts

Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.

Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.

The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.

HDSLR Shooter compares AJA Cion to the BlackMagic Ursa

Jesse Peppin at HDSLR Shooter has a great look at the new AJA Cion vs the BlackMagic Ursa, and he likes the AJA better overall, at least for his purposes.

Overall it sounds like the AJA is a little more Pro, with the ability to record above ProRES HQ in ProRES 4444 (even with the URSA’s upgradeable sensor). Still with no viewfinder you either need a bigger investment or to already have rails and other gear to go with it.

And the worst thing of the Cion, other than not having a viewfinder of it’s own, is that is uses AJA created storage, unlike Blackmagic which uses off the shelf components. Of course hopefully you can then trust them more, but they will cost more.

He is right though, this looks to be the Canon/Nikon of the Videography set.

Black Magic Designs Ursa Upgradeable 4K Camera

BlackMagic Designs has announced a new like of 4K upgradeable cameras called URSA. It starts at $5995 for an EF mount or $6495 for a PL Mount version. There will also be a broadcast version and one without a sensor and just an HDMI in for recording.

This is an impressive looking camera, especially with the 10″ fold out viewfinder and dual touch screens for control. With this Black Magic is going all out with it’s cameras and making a really impressive high end camera to take on RED, and yet be cheaper.

Black Magic DaVinci 10 will support the MacPro and it’s Dual GPU’s, and likely so will Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Cloud

Nonlinear has a post on a post from Grant Petty the CEO of BlackMagic saying that the full version of DaVinci 10 will support the Dual AMD GPU’s of the new MacPros. And Premiere Pro already supports AMD Firepros, and hopefully will soon support the duals of the new MacPro.

I will still rather see Dual NVIDIA GPU support, as CUDA would likely be faster, but this could make the MacPro a viable alternative to the current MacPro without the expansion. Still want to see some speed tests though as I would like to see Premiere Pro rocking Dual Titans!